Department of Psychology, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2011 Jan;37(1):140-8. doi: 10.1037/a0021206.
Two studies examine how the time at which problem solving is suspended relative to an impasse affects the impact of incidental hints. An impasse is a point in problem solving at which a problem solver is not making progress and does not know how to proceed. In both studies, work on remote associates problems was suspended before an impasse was reached, at the time an impasse was reached, or after a period of continued work during an impasse. After problem solving was suspended on a set of problems, participants completed a lexical decision task before resuming work on the set of unsolved problems. For half of the problems suspended during each impasse state, solution words were presented as incidental hints in the lexical decision task. The proportion of initially unsolved problems that were solved after the intervening lexical decision task was greater when problem solving was suspended at the point an impasse was reached than when problem solving was suspended before an impasse or after a period of continued work during an impasse. These results suggest that suspending problem solving at the point of impasse may increase susceptibility to incidentally presented hints. The point of impasse may be an opportune time for hints because the problem has been explored but there has not been a large increase in fixation on failed solution attempts.
两项研究考察了在问题解决过程中暂停相对于僵局的时间如何影响偶然提示的影响。僵局是指在问题解决过程中，问题解决者没有取得进展，并且不知道如何继续前进的一个点。在这两项研究中，在达到僵局之前、在达到僵局时或在僵局期间持续工作一段时间后，远程联想问题的工作被暂停。在解决一组问题后，参与者在继续解决未解决问题的集合之前完成了词汇决策任务。在每个僵局状态暂停的问题中，有一半的解决方案词在词汇决策任务中作为偶然提示呈现。在干预词汇决策任务后，最初未解决的问题中有更多的问题得到解决，这是在达到僵局时暂停问题解决，而不是在僵局前暂停问题解决或在僵局期间持续工作时暂停问题解决的结果。这些结果表明，在僵局点暂停问题解决可能会增加对偶然呈现的提示的敏感性。僵局点可能是提示的一个有利时机，因为问题已经得到了探索，但对失败的解决方案尝试的关注并没有显著增加。
